


Abandonment

by TetrodotoxinB



Series: Whumptober 2019 [26]
Category: Hawaii Five-0 (2010)
Genre: Day 26, Doris and John are both shit, Prompt: Abandonment, Steve has feels about his childhood, Whumptober 2019, that's the entire thing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-26
Updated: 2019-10-26
Packaged: 2021-01-03 08:20:11
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,234
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21176312
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TetrodotoxinB/pseuds/TetrodotoxinB
Summary: Sometimes, cleaning house is more than just doing the laundry.





	Abandonment

**Author's Note:**

> Beta'd by [Secret_Library98](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Secret_Library98/pseuds/Secret_Library98).

The boxes in the attic are the last thing in the house that Steve sorts through after he reclaims the house. He knows some of it is stuff saved from his parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents, and yet more is seasonal junk — a broken Christmas wreath, the platter Doris used for the Easter ham, and the old Army surplus tent that John used to take him camping in. That's the easy stuff; he keeps what he cares about and donates or trashes the rest.

But there remain three boxes in the corner, boxes he's studiously ignored from the moment he realized what they contain. Part of him says there's no reason to open them. It's only three boxes, they hardly take up any space at all. But just knowing they're up there unexamined, makes him feel like the job isn't complete. After a week of trying to ignore them, Steve finally caves and brings them into the living room. 

Steve approaches the boxes like a mission. He takes the tactical position of examining the oldest box first. Most of it is old, some as far back as the 1800s. He flips carefully through the photos and sorts them into some-what coherent stacks before placing them into a new box that is more accurately and completely labelled. 

The second box is a little harder. There's a shoebox labelled "Wedding '72." Steve thumbs through those — a few polaroids and a stack of professional shots. His parents looked so young and happy, so new and unburdened. He wonders what kind of people they were, who he might have gotten to know if things had been different.

It's not a helpful train of thought and Steve closes the shoebox, tucking it into yet another new box where it will stay under the spools of eight millimeter film. Steve ignores those too — Mary's baptism, Steve's first communion, Mary's second grade Christmas pageant where she played a sheep, the homecoming football game Steve's sophomore year where he scored a fifty yard touchdown. Maybe one day he'll watch some of those, but for now he seals the new box and sets it on the floor by the first.

The third box is only pictures — photos of and by friends and family, school photos, newspaper clippings. Some it is sweet, reminder of good times long since forgotten. Other photos are more bittersweet and Steve finds that he can't quite help the tears.

Years and years have passed since Mom died. Years that Steve could have gotten to know Dad, could have had family in his life. In all that time, Steve saw John three times — when he graduated high school on the mainland, when he graduated from Annapolis, and one year when he was between tours and there was space on a cargo plane for him to hitch a ride home for Christmas. It's hard to imagine what his life would have been like if Mom hadn't died, if Dad hadn't sent him away.

He stuffs down the "what ifs" and sets aside another stack of photos. The fourth photo in the next stack is Mom, dressed for work in that hideous blue hibiscus skirt suit, with curly, permed hair and gaudy costume jewelry with rhinestones. It's the first day of Steve's sophomore year, and he and Mary are standing beside Mom in that suit. 

He stares at it because it's probably the last photo anyone took of her, and that's when Steve realizes that she wore that same suit the morning her car went up. 

Grief rolls over him and Steve finds himself caught in a riptide of memory. That day plays out in his head — the static of the intercom calling him to the office, the look on Duke's face when he tells Steve, the strong grip of Dad's hand on his shoulder in place of the hug he desperately wanted. Mary had clung to John at the airport, begged and screamed not to go, and it had been Steve who had carried her, nine years old and sobbing, onto the plane and away from home. 

And suddenly the bittersweetness of all the photos is just bitter, an acrid taste of parental abandonment. John wasn’t keeping them safe — John was trying to settle a score, to get even, to pursue a vendetta. And just like Mom, he and Mary were casualties. The cost of war. Collateral damage.

John didn’t protect them by sending them away; he destroyed the rest of their family. 

Steve scoops the rest of the pictures into a pile and deposits them back in the box. He realizes now that he wasn’t prepared for this, couldn’t have been. He scrubbed the blood out of the carpet, patched the walls, reupholstered the dining room chairs. John’s blood is gone, and the evidence of Steve’s failure with it. But being out-maneuvered by an international terrorist is one thing, something neither Steve nor his head-shed saw coming. It’s not his failure alone. But John had no one to blame but himself, and the emptiness of the house, the empty spaces on the walls where school pictures and family portraits had once hung, speak of a failure that Steve can’t quite comprehend, though he knows he was definitely on the receiving end.

Trying not to overthink it, Steve tapes up the boxes and carries them back up the stairs and then into the attic. The ladder creaks as Steve folds it and pushes it back up into the ceiling, and from downstairs Steve can hear the front door open.

“Steve?”

“Coming, Danny,” Steve shouts.

“Where, uh, where were you?” Danny asks when Steve appears from the master bedroom.

“Attic. Doing some cleaning. You still not figured out how to knock yet?”

Danny scowls. “I knocked. I knocked twice. But you were apparently in the attic and the door was unlocked so I figured you could just ask me to leave if you wanted me gone.”

Steve glances sidelong at Danny as he leads them towards the kitchen. “You know I’m not going to do that.”

“Do I? I don’t know that. Hey, why does cleaning make you look like shit? You going through some of your dad’s stuff?” Danny asks as he accepts a beer from Steve.

Steve remembers that Danny isn’t a detective for nothing and smiles ruefully. “Yeah. There were some boxes in the attic. Lot of old memories.”

Danny sips his beer and nods. “Yeah, I get that. I also get the grief, but you don’t look like you’re grieving, you look, I don’t know, disappointed or something. I don’t know, I’m not a shrink.”

“For ‘not a shrink’ you’re pretty observant,” Steve allows. “But it’s complicated. Lot of stuff happened when I was a kid.”

Danny shrugs. “Yeah, that seems to be about how it goes. So, uh, did Chin call you?”

And no, Chin did not call. They head out to the chairs by the water and spend a few minutes catching up on the latest developments in the case. It’s a good distraction with good company, far better than marinating in what Steve can only bring himself to think of as housework. Barracks life always suited Steve best — minimal space for personal stuff, no closets for skeletons. He knows now, that cleaning the attic isn’t ever going to be the simple chore he thought it would be, but for today, he’s done what he can manage.


End file.
